Don’t Underestimate Your Students

Jan Steen, "The Severe Teacher"

Jan Steen, “The Severe Teacher”

Here’s another recovered blog post, this one written as a successor to the recovered post I shared last Friday. In both I react against the teaching approach of Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s play W;t as I talk about the need to respect how students respond to literature. More often than not, there is substance in even off-the-wall student comments. This post like the other was written at the beginning of the semester.

My novelist friend Rachel Kranz writes an extended and very smart response to last Friday’s post. In case you missed it, I have appended it to today’s post. Rachel is very critical of Edson’s play, which she believes ultimately sells literature short.

Recovered blog post, originally published January 20, 2010

I begin my two literature classes today and, as always, am filled with trepidation.  Will I be the teacher my students need me to be?  Margaret Edson’s play W;t reminds me that, if I stay true to the literature, all will be well.

W;t, functions in part as a criticism of those college literature professors who sacrifice literature’s human dramas to their careers, their intellectual pride, their fear of emotion, and their desire to control. So how might one have taught protagonist Vivian Bearing, noted Donne scholar, so that she didn’t turn out this way? How might she have better taught her student Jason (now her doctor) so that he didn’t turn into a cold and soulless medical researcher.

Well, one only has so much power as a teacher. In some ways, Jason already is tending in a certain direction and he seeks out Vivian to confirm him in his predilections. But even given this, she probably could have sown some doubts in his callous self-assurance.

In my own teaching, above all I strive to respect the literature and respect my students. After over 30 years in the field, I can say with certainty that the literature will yield wisdom and comfort for virtually every life situation and that students can be counted on to find what they need within it.

Students will not always be fully articulate. But in even the most tangled of responses I can often find seeds of a profound insight.  I just need to work with the student to develop it.

There is a scene in W;t which shows the process at work. Vivian claims, after a student tries to work through an idea, that the student comes up short in the end. I would argue that it is rather Vivian that comes up short.  Here’s her recollection:

Student 2: But why?
Vivian: Why what?
Student 2: Why does Donne make everything so complicated? (The other students laugh in agreement) No really, why?
Vivian: (To the audience) You know, someone asked me that every year. And it was always one of the smart ones. What could I say? (To Student 2) What do you think?
Student 2: I think it’s like he’s hiding. I think he’s really confused. I don’t know, maybe he’s scared, so he hides behind all this complicated stuff, hides behind this wit.
Vivian: Hides behind wit?
Student 2: I mean, if it’s really something he’s sure of, he can say it more simple—simply. He doesn’t have to be such a brain, or such a performer. It doesn’t have to be such a big deal.
(The other students encourage him.)
Vivian: Perhaps he is suspicious of simplicity.
Student 2: Perhaps, but that’s pretty stupid.
Vivian: (To the audience) That observation, despite its infelicitous phrasing, contained the seed of a perspicacious remark. Such an unlikely occurrence left me with two choices. I could draw it out, or I could allow the brain to rest after that heroic effort. If I pursued, there was the chance of great insight, or the risk of undergraduate banality. I could never predict. (To student 2) Go on.
Student 2: Well, if he’s trying to figure out God, and the meaning of life, and big stuff like that, why does he keep running away, you know?
Vivian: (To the audience, moving closer to Student 2): So far so good, but they can think for themselves only so long before they begin to self-destruct.
Student 2: Um, it’s like, the more you hide, the less—no, wait—the more you are getting closer—although you don’t know it—and the simple thing is there—you see what I mean?
Vivian: (To the audience, looking at Student 2, as suspense collapses) Lost it.

If the student loses it, however, it’s because Vivian doesn’t help him build on the idea. Given Vivian’s skepticism and contempt (which he must sense), it’s impressive that the student does as well as he does.

The scene impressively shows the student getting at what draws Vivian to Donne, even though Vivian won’t admit it. She has her own versions of Donne’s fears and hides out from those fears, as the poet does, through intellectual gamesmanship. Her intellect is so powerful that she uses it to shield her from her fears. Only when she is facing death and no longer has any place to hide does she come face to face with them.

She admits her lack of integrity, her inauthenticity, in another report of students responding. She is discussing “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” which has a fabulous image of a pair of lovers (maybe John Donne and his wife) separated but connected.  Donne describes gold thread that has been beaten so thin that it cannot be seen and yet still maintains contact. Here is Vivian remembering the scene:

I distinctly remember my exchange between two students after my lecture on pronunciation and scansion. I overheard them talking on their way out class. They were young and bright, gathering their books and laughing at the expense of seventeenth-century poetry, at my expense.

(To the class) To scan the line properly, we must take advantage of the contemporary flexibility in “i-o-n” endings, as in “expansion.” The quatrain stands:

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an ex-pan-see-on,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

Bear this in mind in your reading that’s all for today.
(The students get up in a chaotic burst. Student 3 and Student 4 pass by Vivian on their way out.)
Student 3: I hope I can get used to this pronuncia—see-on.
Student 4: I know. I hope I can survive this course and make it to gradua-see-on.
(They laugh. Vivian glowers at them. They fall silent, embarrassed.)
Vivian: (To the audience) That was a witty little exchange, I must admit. It showed the mental acuity I would praise in a poetic test. But I admired only the studied application of wit, not its spontaneous eruption.

In short, the teacher gets to control how the students respond to the text, thereby always remaining in control herself. But as a result, there has not been a true exploration (or explora-see-on). Imagine how these two students would have felt if Vivian had told them how well they were responding to Donne’s wit. Having students parody a masterpiece can, in fact, draw them far more deeply into it than having them merely analyze it from the outside. For a teacher to respond this way, however, she must be open to literature working in the world in unexpected ways.

What would I do if I had Vivian as a student? I wouldn’t berate her, as her mentor E. M. does, for having brought a faulty edition of “Death Be Not Proud” to class. If one version has a grand flourish and the other a quiet comma (see my earlier post on the play’s handling of the poem), I would encourage her to explore each one. I would ask her which seems more logical, which feels right, and what to make of any discrepancy.

Honoring student feelings is important if we are to engage their emotional intelligence. In her youth Vivian appears to have loved grand flourishes and virtuoso word play. Good, that’s as it should be. Youth is a time for grand flourishes.

Unfortunately, she came to believe that she had to rein in her passion, letting it emerge in only the most circuitous of ways. Note, for instance her dissertation title: “Ejaculations in Seventeenth-Century Manuscript and Printed Editions of the Holy Sonnets: A Comparison.” The ejaculations she means are not the kind that you think she means (even though Donne’s poems make constant references to such ejaculations). I think the ejaculation she has in mind is the grammatical utterance that expresses a feeling outside of normal language structure (like “oh!”).  Except that, deep down, Vivian means the other kind of ejaculation as well—the sexual explosion, the excitement, the passion. She has just buried strong emotions deep.

Anyway, as her teacher I would have encouraged her to explore her fear of her feelings and I would have validated her hidden self.  If I had had Jason as a student in a Donne class and knew he was going to be a doctor, I would have encouraged him to explore Donne’s terror of death, knowing that one day he would be facing such terror in his patients.

Maybe I would have reached such students or maybe they would just have sought out another teacher, one less “touchy-feely.” Maybe Vivian needs to get cancer to learn what she learns and maybe that will be true of Jason as well. Then again, maybe there would be some opening for insight.

Response from novelist Rachel Kranz to the post of October 24, 2014

I really love this post, Robin, and am sorry I missed it the first time around (or maybe I saw it and just don’t remember?).

However, I have to say, I really HATED W;t, and am continually surprised that you–and other people who have devoted their lives to literature and are really smart about it–didn’t feel as insulted by the work as I did.

It seemed to me that the writer made an easy divide between intellect and emotion, between Donne and “The Runaway Bunny”–one that isn’t fair either to intellectuals who study literature OR to Donne and other writers who might take some work to fully understand and appreciate, but who repay that work in a rich and multidimensional way.

The idea that you have to WORK to understand literature sometimes, and that, as a writer, you have to work to make it complex and multidimensional, seems alien to a lot of American culture–and theater–and to me, W;t pandered to that wish that things be easy and emotional, rather than complex and challenging.

You obviously DO stand for WORKING to understand literature, and you help your students learn how to do that! However, the idea that there is something noble and fulfilling in thinking about literature–that as you say, Donne could be a true consolation to a dying woman, rather than “The Runaway Bunny”–is also alien to a lot of American culture.

The really sad thing about the play was that what the dying woman REALLY wanted and needed was not a book but a human, specifically, a mother–someone to love her, console her, and read her a children’s story. I get it–that IS what you want when you are sick and scared and facing the unknown, whether it’s death or just a new stage of life. And literature can’t replace human contact–no one who loves it would think that it could or should, which is why I hated the play creating a “straw woman” whose flaw is that she avoids human contact and focuses on her intellectual games with Donne.

But as a writer and reader, I have to hope that literature–challenging, complex literature–speaks to the scared adult in us as well as to the scared child. I have to hope that devoting your life to literature–whether as writer or reader–is not by definition sterile and a substitute for human relationships, which is the false dichotomy on which the play depends. I kept hoping that the play would end with the woman able to say, “Now that I am dying, I REALLY understand Donne, and I am repaid for my devotion to him,” instead of, “Now that I am dying, I see that I shouldn’t have sought in books what I really needed to get from humans.” Of course, she SHOULDN’T have done that–but the play implies that any true devotion to literature (or to science and medicine) is really only a way of running away from human contact.

I’ve often thought about W;t, especially as I went on to face my own illnesses, and I’ve thought about that part of us that really wants and needs the Mommy to read us “Runaway Bunny” when we’re scared. In the play, the image of the Mommy saying to the Bunny, “Wherever you run to, I will find you, and you can always come home” is a metaphor for God saying that to the scared and dying human who has run from His love. That IS a comforting thought–but I would love to think that the complexities of theology and literature and human thought help us come to that realization in a deeper way, rather than that they are filigree that prevents us from getting to the real truth. To a writer and reader, it’s awful to think that you don’t really NEED the adult complexities and challenges of literature–you just need the childlike comfort. I would like to believe that there is a kind of ADULT comfort–as well as other things–that great literature can offer, and that the greater the literature, the greater the truth it enables us to see. And I would love to believe–though maybe I’m just a Romantic!–that seeing the Truth really is what sets us free, or at least helps us come to terms with life and death in a more inspired way.

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